Modern Knitting….a new spin on an old craft!

Archive for May, 2011

The drive behind this blog, Modern Knitting, is to monitor what’s going on in the yarn bombing community. So, for this week—and for however long you’d like—we’re asking you to submit links to your blogs or links to pictures that you’ve taken of your yarn bombing. Plus, we’ll put you in our blogroll to help everyone find artists in their area. People want to connect with like minds, and Modern Knitting would like to help bring artists closer together.

If you don’t have a link to share—and even if you do—we’d love for you to post what yarn bombing means to you. Let’s keep up the energy and keep spreading the joy.

Whether yarn bombers like it or not, yarn graffiti is gaining a lot of attention. Usually, just local papers ran stories about bundled up trees and colorful poles, but now even the New York Times is taking notice.

On May 18, The New York Times published a piece in their fashion and style section giving their readers a taste of yarn bombing and what’s going on across the globe.

It inclues interview snippets from a few well-known yarn bombers like Magda Sayeg, and notes the different kinds of yarn bombers—you know, all those potholes being filled—and KTC, who calls it yarn storming.

There’s been TV coverage, too. This CNN video (5/9/2011) covers yarn bombing in Austria and shows that it is either a big enough story or an interesting enough puff piece to use on a broadcast.

This segment ran a few years ago (11/20/2009) and shows the beginnings of interest in yarn bombing.

As bigger newspapers cover yarn bombing tales instead of just local newspapers, and as footage is taken for the yarn graffiti documentary, yarn bombing will gain more visibility in the mainstream media.

If a local paper or news station has done a story about you or someone in your town, please post the link and share the excitement with me and others!

A few posts ago, I talked about how to fit yarn bombing into your everyday activities. I mentioned that while watching television is a great time to knit or crochet.

Well, some shows are easier to work to than others, and I’m ready to share them with you.

1. Cooking Shows
You don’t have to watch every second to know what’s happening. If you have to look at your work for a bit you can, while still listening to what’s going on.

What to watch
Chopped. Four chefs compete to win $10,000. Each episode is one story, so there’s nothing to catch up on and not much to remember. Also there are three rounds: appetizer, main course and dessert. If you miss one segment you still have the others. This show is pretty entertaining not just because of the cooking but also because they use weird ingredients in the mandatory baskets.

2. Reruns
Reruns of your favorite shows are fantastic to watch while working on your next yarnbomb. You already know what’s going to happen, and if you’re like me, you could quote it line by line. If you’re working on something more difficult you can give your attention to it and still have the background sound of your favorite show to trigger your memory to what is going on visually.

What to watch
Your favorite show!!! Some good ones are The Simpsons, Friends, The Office, and really whatever you connect with.

3. Your Guilty Pleasure Show
This is the show you watch that you realize probably isn’t the best, but you just have to know what happens. During this show you can make up for your lost time by doing something productive! If you use your guilty pleasure TV time as your working time, you will feel better about watching it.

What to watch
If you don’t have a guilty pleasure show then … maybe you’re lucky. Just make sure you really do enjoy the show and you’re not just watching it to feel upset afterwards.

NOTE: You can watch a lot of shows on Hulu.com and on the network sites. If you watch them this way, you can pause, rewind or fast-forward—or if you have a DVR you can just use that. This way, if anything happens with your project, you can just pause.

I’d love to hear what your favorite shows are to work to, and may even add them to my knitting TV time, so feel free to comment.

As promised I was able to interview with Sarah Gonzalez, the woman who has taken on the challenge of creating a Yarn Bombing Documentary. She was extremely nice and our interview was very conversational and charged with a sense of excitement speaking about Yarn bombing, which we both are passionate about.

While Sarah is only twenty six, she has already graduated from UT for film and has three jobs working within her field, two of them for non-profits and you can tell talking to her that she is passionate about her work and about this work in progress.

It is amazing when someone can really work with passion and Sarah has managed to merge her love for graffiti, knitting and film into this one artistic venture. What started as a plan to create a short documentary quickly transformed into an ambitious, long term, worldwide trip to document what is actually happening in this new art form.

Sarah was able to get in touch with Magda Sayeg, the innovator of Yarn Bombing, and now often spends time with her. You can tell that Sarah has support from many Yarn Bombers from Magda’s involvement, the involvement of other Yarnbombers and all the tweets and retweets about the documentary. You can literally see the amount of support building everyday just searching for tweets on yarnbombing, I’ll bet at least one for every five are about the documentary.

Unfortunately when taking on a task this big there is funding to worry about. This is why Sarah created a website where people can donate as little or as much as they like to help support this artistic endeavor.

Every little bit helps and Sarah is wowed that so many people are willing to participate. For you big spenders out there looking to help the arts, a donation of $500 dollars not only helps the film a lot but you’ll also earn the coveted homemade dinner with the director and producer with some postdinner knitting. What more could you even want!!! It’s these kinds of personal touches to the fundraiser that makes me even more convinced that Sarah is the right person to spread the word on this community based art. We put this art out to share the love, and Sarah wants to help to share the love with anyone willing to watch her film.

Once the documentary is finished Sarah hopes that it will help show people who have never heard of Yarnbombing, or who have heard but don’t understand why people become Yarnbombers and why this art brings so much happiness to people. She hopes that it will bring joy to young and old and encourage people to actively participate and get excited about Yarnbombing.

I hope reading this makes you as excited about the documentary as I am. Really having someone who is a yarnbomber, who loves what she does and loves spreading this joy creating a documentary about an art form that brings joy is perfect. We’re all passionate about something and Sarah Gonzalez gets to express her interests in a once in a lifetime film. I wish her luck and encourage you to show your support as well!!

The message is powerful and stands for what yarn bombing is meant to do. To me yarn bombing spreads joy to others with a bright surprise on an otherwise dull pole or bench. The message is different for everyone, but regardless: “We don’t knit for hate.”

Sarah is asking for support and donations so that this documentary can go from vision to a reality. Making a documentary of what is happening now would not only open our eyes as yarn bombers, but also open our eyes to the artistic possibilities that exist in everyday activities.

Already I’m seeing more tweets, more pictures, and more blogs about knit graffiti, so let’s keep it up and support each other. If you can’t donate any money to the cause, you can help support by following and retweeting @Gonzography, which is Sarah’s twitter handle.

Keep updated on this documentary; it may be the next step in yarn bombing becoming mainstream.

I’m also working on interviewing Sarah for an upcoming post, so keep checking in for more details. I’ll be excited to share it with you!!!